We celebrate our books; we ourselves are a work in progress, fifty-years-strong and growing branch by branch.
Eight years ago while at a retreat on the coast of California, a fellow participant and I were looking out the bay windows of the cozy meeting space onto the cold, blustery scene outside.
“I’m so glad I’m in here right now and not out there,” she remarked, shuddering with a mock shiver. “Thank goodness for central heat.”
“Absolutely,” I replied as I reached down to the air vent. “But you know what’s odd? I don’t think the heat is even on.”
My acquaintance looked over quizzically and walked to the thermostat. Sure enough, the heat was off, and yet the room was remarkably warm. “I guess that intense session we just had generated all the heat we needed!” she said, half-joking.
Over lunch, she and I explored the implications of this. Not scientifically—neither of us was qualified to calculate how much literal heat twenty-five humans talking passionately about life and creativity can generate—but rather from an organizational-development standpoint: If twenty-five humans working together were truly empowered, respected, and actualized as individuals within the collective, what kind of fortitude and resilience—in terms of staff morale, job retention, financial stability, production output, community collaboration, and public standing—might result?
In other words, could we generate heat without all the fossil fuel?
“I think you can do this at North Atlantic Books,” said my friend, who worked in organizational development. “You’re a nonprofit, and you’ve got a great history, staff, catalog, and mission. What would it look like to foster an environment where everyone involved feels welcome and validated, and to talk and adjust openly when they don’t?”
I had never been part of an experiment like this. Everywhere I had worked had significant organizational issues casting shadows over people’s individual lights. I considered it mild workplace depression. Something that, unfortunately, was just part of work. To imagine a different way felt almost illicit: not an experiment in creating a utopia—rather just a fuller, more authentic version of ourselves, writ large.
I couldn’t wait to begin.
The years since have been fascinating, surprising, rocky, fruitful, and, ultimately, deeply rewarding. Truly, our organization has undergone a transformation, not through one major intervention or from one or two people’s leadership: It’s that we all looked at the internal and external factors dimming our lights and did what was within our power to switch them.
We still have a lot of work to do, but I feel pride and gratitude for what we—as a staff; as a board; as a community of writers, illustrators, readers, and careholders—have been able to achieve. It’s not often we sit and name this, but a fiftieth anniversary seems an apt time to do so.
I see five principal keys to our experiment in actualization:
*Diversifying who we are. A friend once told me, “As a woman of color, it matters to me who is in the house of the party I am invited to: If there is no one who looks like me, then I’m probably going to walk back to my car. I just wouldn’t feel welcome; besides, parties with folks of just one stroke aren’t very fun!” Before our transformation, our house was homogeneous in many predictable ways. This is not what our staff or board wanted; it had become so by default, which is how hegemony works: “business as usual” reproduces held power. And so we made intentional and explicit interventions to diversify our community. We now look different, and are different: today our staff and board reflect the makeup of the very diverse Bay Area community around us, from ethnicity to age to gender. And 38 percent of our new books in this 50th year of operation are authored by writers of color; in 2011, this number was 9 percent.
*Building equity and transparency. Inequity lives in almost every closed door and password-protected document. “You don’t need to say it for me to know it,” a board member once told me about discrimination. “Sadly, I’m an expert at detecting it.” Inequity buries collectives because unfairness is corrosive: someone getting a perk someone else doesn’t get; pay differentials for the same work; informal power gained from shared identities between supervisor and report; gendered or ageist assumptions about who has wisdom and who doesn’t; exceptions made for someone because of who they know in an organization or because they want to be coddled as a way of bypassing anti-oppression work.
For all of these reasons we made a commitment to build more equity and transparency, inside and out. We now have a transparent salary scale in which the ratio between the highest paid staff member and the lowest is 2.68:1. (In corporate America, this ratio averages around 200:1. Most nonprofits have a ratio between 4:1 and 5:1.) Our promotion process is clear and evolving. Staff members are invited to sit in on any board meeting they wish to. We regularly talk in layperson language about our contracts with partners before they sign. When we arrive at a decision an author struggles with, we explain our reasoning rather than assuming our power to make a decision explains itself. And we keep our equity lenses sharp by participating in a different training each year as staff, from racial justice to gender equality to inclusive editing to disability justice. We seek to understand the ways we perpetuate harmful practices and attitudes in our work and look for practical ways to interrupt these.
*Navigating power, speaking with courage. I once had a boss who complained a lot about “gossip” in the workplace. “Why don’t folks just come to me?” they wondered. They wanted open sharing but seemed unaware of how their power, in and of itself, made this difficult for many. NAB had a lot of crosstalk when I first arrived: pent-up feelings spilling over into venting or mutters under the breath. The grievances were real, but they didn’t have a place to go. Sharing beef, or setting boundaries, is difficult: it takes tact, preparation, self-awareness, and care. And so we’ve had to work hard on having courageous conversations: speaking directly to colleagues or authors when something is amiss, and being open and non-defensive when they do the same. As Prentis Hemphill has said, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” We’ve also gotten clearer on our role as a publisher; as we often ask authors and illustrators, “We see you as the expert on the content; can you see us as the experts on publishing books?” Mutual trust is a building block of beloved community.
*Embodying care. When I first started at NAB, one of my colleagues said in a meeting, “We publish so many books about healing and care, but it’s like there is a glass barrier between our books and who we are.” Our mission since then has been to smash this glass. This has taken many forms: caring for ourselves as staff by broadening “bereavement” days to cover any form of grief, from a family member’s illness at home to the murder of a civilian at the hands of a soldier in another country; closing the office for days beyond federally recognized holidays, including International Women’s Day, the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, and Indigenous Peoples’ Day; supporting authors when they face online abuse because of their identity or from speaking truth to power; and thanking people when they challenge us respectfully in areas where we are just beginning to learn.
*Pursuing excellence. Selling books is not easy: margins are tight; other media beckon; free content reigns. It is our belief that books need every extra lift of air they can get to reach the flying altitude they deserve. Compelling covers; strong copy; informative and enticing titles and subtitles; clean and readable text; affordability and accessibility in bookstores; relevance to readers worldwide—these are the hallmarks of NAB books. And they’ve come by no accident: we’ve increased our layers of editorial eyes on material; we’re resourceful and savvy with our promotion and have strengthened our connections with readers and media contacts; we’ve harnessed our relationship with distributor Penguin Random House to elicit stronger feedback on early iterations; we’ve gotten comfortable knowing when to insist on a cover or title because it will give a book the best chance at success. This doesn’t mean we don’t listen or don’t make mistakes; just that we take ourselves seriously enough to build in systems and protocols that minimize their occurrence. Readers know when they are holding one of our books—how it contributes to healing and justice; how it looks, feels, and reads like a great book should.
As for the books, where would we be without them?
From Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts to Martín Prechtel’s canon of writing to Radical Dharma to Healing with Whole Foods to Waking the Tiger to Bayo Akomolafe to Fresh Banana Leaves to Grieving While Black to Postcolonial Astrology to Francis Weller to Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve to The Modern Herbal Dispensatory to Hospicing Modernity to Benebell Wen to The Land in Our Bones, our books and their authors are our blessings. To co-create in community is an act of joy, and when the creations themselves then take flight into readers’ hands and work their spells of truth and healing, the effect is exponential and multidimensional. When anyone asks me how book publishing is going I say, “I’m happy to report that people still read books.” The mystery and power of the dog-eared page remains.
We celebrate our books; we ourselves are a work in progress, fifty-years-strong and growing branch by branch.
And we have more visions to co-locate. We would like to pay our staff higher wages and our authors higher royalties while simultaneously pricing our books in a way that keeps them accessible. This is no small feat in publishing. We would like to restore the paid internship program we began in 2021, when we sought to broaden our field by teaching the ins and outs of publishing to people from backgrounds under-represented in the industry. We would like to pay the Shuumi Land Tax again as we did in 2021 and 2022 to pay our due for working on this land and to support Indigenous rematriation efforts. And we would like to earmark more funds for moral and emotional-health support for our authors confronting hate. All this while we continue to publish books for the cornerstones.
We do what we do from our book sales, which is an enviable position for a nonprofit. Our sales have grown 37 percent since 2017, and we invest this back into our ecosystem. And yet as a nonprofit with no corporate sponsors or foundation grants, donations from our allies help us lean even further into our becoming. A major birthday seems like a fair time to ask the community for your support in helping us embody our mission with even more scope and vigor. Would you consider chipping in? Donating to us is easy and tax-deductible, and any amount will help. Your goodwill is another source of warmth as we prepare the room by the bay for future programming.
–Tim McKee
Publisher
